The Confessions of X (10 page)
We spoke little on that journey, hearts stunned by the breaching of our secret love as if we stood together on a deck and watched our ship drive toward the rocks. We knew a reckoning was near and dreaded it, the mountains close-threatening, each peak distinct as if papyrus-cut, a portent and a sign.
And yet the beauty of our first journey is with me still like ephemera of dreams that come unbidden to the mind long after
sleep is past, clear as if I looked on them again and know them real: the seabirds shouldering the following air, cutting and dipping like Icarus gone beneath the cliffs, their cries a paean to their daring; the salt on his lips as we kissed; the dust so thick and choking in the first spring heat, we resembled those sad shades who wander on the nearer shore, no coin to pay the ferryman. We bathed in rivers that ran like molten silver through plotted fields, our teeth aching from the cold, my belly buoyant on the swell, toes sifting velvet mud. I washed my hair and combed it on the riverbank, my fingers carding it like skeins of wool as he watched me.
“My mother's hair,” I told him. “Or so my father told me.”
“My mother also,” he said and then grew silent, the dread we felt returning as if the sun had dimmed and all the birds gone silent.
We reached the outskirts of Thagaste a week later. Augustine pulled up beside a wayside shrine where oaten cakes lay moldering on mossâgrown stones beside a spring, encircling them a frailty of wild flowers woven in a wreath and long since dried, the god, it seemed, indifferent to decay. I climbed down and sat beside it.
“Are you well?” He knelt beside me and, smoothing back my hair, peered up into my face.
“She will hate me and the child,” I said, tears trickling down my face. I cried so easily now it sometimes made Augustine smile but not today. He took me by the shoulders and gave me a little shake. “Don't be silly,” he said. “My mother will love you and the babe. It's me she will be angry with and not for long. My mother is too good to stay angry. There is nothing to fear from her.”
I looked at him doubtfully.
He took my hand and, lifting me, helped me brush down my
dress. We washed our faces in the spring beneath the shrine and then went on through country lanes, around the town until we came to a road where stones were piled on either side like ruined pillars. He turned in there and set the mules to walking.
On either side were vineyards with orchards and olive groves planted on the slopes where the ground began to rise toward the mountains.
“Siesta,” he said as if to explain the emptiness of the fields. “My mother insists the servants rest until it's cool.”
Our African spring came early and already in April the sun was high and warm, coaxing out all manner of field flowers and a froth of apple and pear blossoms whose heady scent made me dizzy.
Ahead, saffron-colored tiles of a villa's roof showed through dark-green cypress trees planted all around to give it shade. As we rounded a bend someone came running, a middle-aged man, sun-lined and thick in the shoulders where his tunic stretched taut. He took the bridle of the leading mule and walked beside us, face upturned and joyous.
“Cyrus,” Augustine said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “How are you?”
“Well, young master,” he said and then nodded to me. “Mistress.”
I looked down, shy at such a formal greeting from a servant as if I were far above him and not a mosaic-layer's child who had slept outdoors and often went hungry.
“Does my father live?”
“He does,” Cyrus said, “but sinking fast. Thank God you came in time. Your mother has been praying for your swift return.”
The path opened onto a round courtyard fronting the house. Terra-cotta urns with ancient rosemary bushes, cut in spiral form,
stood on either side of the doorway, and a woman, small and fine-boned as a bird, her dress the color of cream and of such simplicity that, at first, I took her for a servant, was shadowed there. Her ice-brown hair was parted in the middle and drawn in graying wings over her ears then gathered at her nape. She wore no jewelry except a plain gold band on her left hand, which burned in the sunlight as she held it out.
“My dear,” she said, taking my hand to help me down. “Come in and welcome.” I knew her now; she was the domina of the household, Augustine's mother, Monica, come out into the sun like a peasant's wife to welcome me to her home.
Without another word she led me in, still holding my hand, Augustine following. No word he spoke to her, yet I could feel a silent conversation going back and forth as if they signed by thought. She led me through an atrium, where a fountain fell in sparkling shards, and then on into a room shuttered to the heat, cool and whitewashed as an anchorite's cell with the sound of wood doves purling in the eves and the soft plash of the fountain outside the door. A large bed was pushed against a wall, on a ledge above it a cross fashioned out of sticks joined with a leather thong; an oil lamp on a chest, beside it bread and cheese and apples, a pitcher of water and a cup, a bowl for washing, an ivory comb and pins, a small stone jar before a bronze mirror; a single chair and a footstool in the corner by the bed, a carven cradle, black with age and lined with a coverlet of blue-dyed wool. When I saw the careful preparation, how every object in the room bespoke one woman's thoughtfulness for another, I began to weep, tears of gratitude and exhaustion streaming down my face unbidden and unstoppable as rain.
“Hush, child. Hush,” said Monica, embracing me and rocking back and forth the way mothers comfort children when they are hurt in soul or body or imagine themselves so. Short as I was, I had to bend to lay my head against her shoulder. Her hair smelled of sandalwood, and faintly in her clothes was an acrid tang of wood-smoke as if she herself stirred the pot before the fire, which, I later learned, she did. Then stepping back, she pushed me gently down on the bed and, lifting my legs along its length, began to untie my sandals.
“You must rest,” she said, placing the shoes on the floor. “You have had a wearying journey.” Bending down she kissed me on the forehead and, motioning Augustine out, softly shut the door. In that moment, before I slept, I loved her. And yet a tiny corner of my soul, one deep in shadow and almost unregarded, felt suborned, as if her kindness was a trap and I must be on my guard.
When I awoke the shadows were long in the room and for a moment I did not know where I was. Then I heard the sound of voices in the corridor near my door and backless sandals slip-slopping on stone, pottery clinking, the smell of cooking meat, which made my stomach twist with hunger. I arose and put on my sandals, dashed water on my face, and twisted up my hair. Then I opened the door and looked out. A woman carrying a jar was passing in the atrium. She smiled and beckoned.
“The mistress said to take you to her when you awoke.”
I followed lagging, my eyes seeking out the home of him I loved as if to catch his imprint there and so, in holding it, possess
the years that I had missed. Here he was born, wrinkled and mewling, sleeping with his fists bunched up beneath his chin, his mother's foot gently pressing that ancient cradle, perhaps singing a Berber song from her ancestral tribe to lull him into dreams. There he walked his first steps pulling a toy horse on a string, tottering and unsure. There crouched beside the fountain he lined up stones for soldiers, miniature battles for which he wove a grass crown for his head, acclaiming himself
imperator
on the field. Such I have seen young boys do in the forum, their older sisters a row of mocking monkeys squatting on temple steps, scornful of the bellicose strutting of little men.
The servant was standing at a door with her arm held wide to indicate I should enter. Voices murmured, and then sudden silence. I was certain they had been talking about me. Feeling as if I were intruding, I hesitated. Augustine rose at once and came toward me, taking me by the hand and drawing me farther in as if he thought I would run away.
“Here,” said Monica, patting the couch on which she sat.
Unsure, I glanced at Augustine. I wanted to be near him, and the distance across the room from where he stood and where his mother sat seemed so great. He smiled and nodded slightly as if to say: I am here, my love.
“And place a footstool by her, Augustine.” Then she gestured across the room. “This is Cybele.”
From a corner a shape resolved itself amongst the shadows, an ancient crone bent double so her head craned up to see. Her head was almost hairless, her mouth a stitched and crumpled gash, which champed toothlessly at nothing.
“Cybele was my nurse,” Augustine said, “the tyrant of the nursery.”
“And mine,” laughed Monica. “She is the true domina of this house.” Cybele's clawlike hand plucked at her dress as if she was cold, and when she spoke it was in a Punic dialect of the tribe of the Garamantes that my father taught me when I was a girl.
“Seven moons,” I answered in that same language.
Again the nod, a kind of grimace for a smile, which I returned.
“Excuse me, mistress,” a male servant said, coming into the room, his tunic's crimson braid at neck and hem proclaiming him steward. “Cook asks if you want to check the roast. He says it's done.”
Monica stood up. “Thank you, Marcus. I quite forgot.” Then to me, “Forgive me, my dear.”
She moved like a girl though I knew her to be almost forty. Beside her, with my growing belly, I felt stupefied and gross, a placid heifer gazing blankly over the paddock fence.
Cybele seemed to have fallen asleep, a pile of clothes heaped on a chair, her breathing almost nothing in the stillness of the room, a mouse's breath, no more.
Augustine tucked a rug around her legs and then whispered: “Come.” He took my hand and helped me rise for I found it hard to get up from a sitting position now that I was so weighted down by the baby. “Father asked to see us when you awoke.”
And so he led me, still clasping my hand as if to keep me near in this strange place where he was at home and I was not. We crossed the atrium at the center of the house, an old-fashioned design the way the Romans used to build their villas when first they came to Africa, to another room, spacious and airy, lamps burning around
a bed, a burnished nimbus as if a mist of gold had settled there. A shape lay there so still it seemed an effigy, covers drawn tight across the chest, hands clutching the sheets as if to delay the body's passing. The face I saw seemed molded out of beeswax, an
imago
of the living. I saw the covers rise and fall minutely and the orbs beneath the blue-veined lids move side to side as if he watched a phantom game of catch.
Beside the bed a young man sat, some years older than Augustine but clearly of his blood. He had the same dark hair, the same brown eyes, although a fraction taller and heavier of build. He rose when we entered, embraced Augustine, and bowed to me.
“I am Navigius,” he whispered. Then to his brother: “He fell asleep just now but if you wait awhile he might awaken.” He put a hand briefly on Augustine's shoulder, bowed once more to me, and left the room.
There was an odor in the room of putrefaction as if the body had already begun its slow descent into the earth, a viscous slide of parts unjointing, and I recoiled, my hand going to my belly as if to ward off that thing called Death from him whose life had barely begun. I have heard it said that pregnant women must not go near a death chamber for fear the child will catch the taint and I believed such notions until I learned what all must learn if they live as long as I: that life is a kind of dying, there is no border over which we cross from one to another but dwell always in its precincts.
Augustine's face was stone, as if his father, Medusa-like, had reached out and touched his heart. I looked to see if I might glimpse anything of the son in the father, but the figure before me seemed hardly human, so still he lay, so absolute his last composure. His
hair was white and sparse, his nose jutted blade-like from his face, on his neck and arms brown blotches showed, the dying body's harbinger. Then, horribly, like a half-crushed spider, a hand unfurled and crawled toward me.
“Come closer,” the effigy said.
“It's me, Father.”
“Not you. The girl.”
His filmy eyes flared briefly as he looked on me. I recalled Augustine saying he always had an eye for a comely girl, that he would put his hands on the servant girls.
“Pretty,” he said. It seemed a kind of horror that despite the dissolution of his body, it still retained the urges it was powerless to satisfy. His hand gripped mine.
“Remember this,” he said to me, glancing at Augustine. “God's hook is in his heart.”
P
atricius lived another day and then died, his going hard and pitiless. During his illness, he had consented to be baptized and a priest had come and chanted words, a censer swinging smoky arcs that made Patricius choke, baptized him, then anointed him with olive oil smudged on forehead, eyes, mouth, ears, feet, and hands, a greasy cross that glistened in the lamplight. Then he took a piece of bread, made signs over it, and fed it between Patricius' blue-tinged lips. I was ashamed for his helplessness, his heaving breaths, while the living stood around his bed like Olympian gods as if impervious to the rigors of their mortal flesh. Used as I was to pagan corteges in the streets of Carthage where keening women tore their hair and painted mummers mocked the foibles of the corpse, this tearless Christian gravity seemed an insult to the dying, as if the living grieved not at all, and I could not imagine Christ's mother would not have beat her breast beneath the cross and called down curses on her son's murderers.